Tuesday, November 07, 2006

Surprise - pthread_cond_timedwait takes an absolute time!

Whoever reads the man pages anyway? Turns out pthread_cond_timedwait takes an absolute time! In otherwords, if you want it to sleep for 1 second, you have to pass one second more than the current time, as returned by gettimeofday (yuck) and converted from a timeval to a timespec (double yuck).

As much as I gripe about this because most threading APIs take relative timeouts (as does select), there actually is a use for this.

When writing a thread-safe message queue you might write something like this to read the queue:

Now...you might wonder, why do we need a while loop? The answer is: it's possible that between the time that our thread is woken up (vai the condition variable wait) due to a message being queued and the time we actually run, get the lock, and continue execution, another thread could have come along and stolen our message. (Note that another thread can go through this code without ever calling pthread_cond_timedwait if there is already a message, which is good for performance. This is not a FIFO message queue!) Thus we have to while-loop around until we reach a point where we've woken up, acquired the lock, and the message is still there. Once we have that lock, the message isn't going anywhere and we can safely exit the loop.

This is where the absolute time is handy - we might go around the loop 6 times. But the "deadline" - the time after which there's no point in waiting, we should return to the user, is an absolute time, and can be invariant across the loop. Thus there is no need to measure how much time has gone by on each loop and decrement our wait time.